Wherever there is money to be made, it seems there is always someone who wants to carry out “dodgy dealings”, and unfortunately, this does not help the public’s perception about Cryptocurrencies.

Law courts globally continue to hand out prison sentences to people who have some form of involvement with Cryptos and, while some of the nefarious activities are clearly criminal, some of those perpetrators are indeed extraordinary.

Take Mr. Ye Lin Myint who was jailed for two years in Singapore, as he admitted to criminal intimidation and harassment against a multitude of people. The 36-year-old threatened to harm 30 people unless they transferred one Bitcoin each to him. However, instead of signing off his threats from Harry Potter’s arch-enemy “Lord Voldemort,” he added an extra “R” and signed himself as “Lord Voldermort”!

Meanwhile, rather than “whistle while you work” (aka Snow White and the seven dwarfs), an Australian government employee is being charged for “mining while he worked”. The 33-year-old man has been charged for mining Cryptocurrencies using government equipment that he had modified. This type of illegal Cryptocurrency mining using government property is similar to the story reported by the BBC last year about the Russians who allegedly rigged-up a supercomputer at The Federal Nuclear Centre in Sarov, western Russia, to mine Bitcoins.

In the US, Jacob Burrell Campos, a 22-year-old, has admitted breaching anti-money laundering checks, and operating a Bitcoin exchange business without registering his company. Campos has had to forfeit the $823,000+ money he made, and he has been in custody since August 2018. Also in the USA, Morgan Rockcoons from Nevada, has been charged with operating an illegal Bitcoin exchange and charged with fraud, resulting in being sentenced to 21 months in prison. Rockcoons allegedly sold 18 acres of land “which was supposed to be used to build Bitcointopia, a “Bitcoin megacity” in Elko County, Nevada” but he only owned 5 acres!

Then there is the case of Mark Karples, who has spent 11 months in a Japanese prison due to his involvement with the Mt. Gox affair, where over 600,000 Bitcoins (which would be worth today just under $5 billion) went missing. Karples has been charged with tampering with Mt. Gox’s records and was given a 2.5 year suspended sentence.

So, regardless of which jurisdiction, we have already seen people “doing time” and no doubt there will be many others facing the “strong arm of the law”. Hopefully, as these charlatans are apprehended and dealt with, this will deter others from carrying out criminal activities involving Crypto and Digital Assets.

The fact that “bad actors” are being sentenced ought to offer reassurance that people working with Digital Assets are subject to the normal law of the land and will face appropriate consequences.

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